In his 1680 preface to Ovid’s Epistles Translated by
Several Hands, John Dryden considers the choices any
translator must make. Whereas the fidelity of a word-for-word
translation is “a faith like that which proceeds from
Superstition,” the translator who endeavors “not to Translate [the
author’s] words, or to be Confin’d to his Sense, but only…to write,
as he supposes that Authour would have done, had he liv’d in our
Age, and in our Country” adopts a “libertine way of rendring
Authours.” Dryden fears that “mischief may arise … from…so bold an
undertaking” (9v-10r). Seven years later, John Phillips—the nephew,
pupil, and collaborator of John Milton—fulfilled Dryden’s prophesy,
publishing The History of the most Renowned Don Quixote of
Mancha: and his Trusty Squire Sancho Pancha, Now made English
according to the Humour of our Modern Language. Dryden would
have probably judged this translation “libertine… mischief ”
(10r).

Peter Anthony Motteux, the main contributor to a 1700 English
translation of Don Quixote, certainly did:

Never did Spaniard suffer more by Drake, than our Knight of
La Mancha by the Writer of that English-Spanish
Quixote…. He has… chang’d the Sense, ridicul’d the most
serious and moving Passages, remov’d all the scandalous places in
London into the middle of Spain, and all the Language of
Billingsgate into the Mouths of Spanish Ladies and Noblemen. He
has…added a World of Obscenity and scribling Conceits…and to be
sure will plead Design for his Mistake …and that his Piece is an
Improvement, not a Translation of Don Quixote.

We expect subsequent translators to criticize their predecessors
in order to make room for a new translation. Still, judgments of
contemporary readers echo Motteux’s harshness: the “senceless”
imposition of English place-names and slang turns Phillips’s
translation to “nonscence” (qtd. in Randall and Boswell 496,
602).

This essay will argue that the translation project of Milton’s
well-educated, well-read nephew was neither “nonscense” nor
“senceless”; he had a “Design,” as even Motteux grants, although he
deems it a “Mistake.” Explicating Phillips’s design to make
Cervantes’s novel “English according to the Humour of our
Modern Language” will require reviewing Phillips’s
education, sampling his style, and placing his translation in the
context of his career as a professional writer. This context will
allow us to compare Cervantes’s negotiation of the perils of
publication in Counter-Reformation Spain to Phillips’s negotiation
of the London book trade in the era of the Popish Plot, the
Exclusion Crisis, and the ascendency of James II.

I

After the death of Milton’s sister, Phillips came to live with
his uncle from 1639–40 to 1651–52, during the formative years
between eight OR nine and his majority (Shawcross 96). If we
can assume that Milton taught Phillips according to the plan
outlined in “Of Education” (1644), Phillips’s education was both
classical and progressive. After due attention to the
sensible/material world, as Bacon would have approved, Milton’s
students turn to the more abstract disciplines of logic, rhetoric,
and poetry, practicing “the fitted style of lofty, mean, or lowly,”
and learning “what decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to
observe” (Milton 636–7).

Once he reached his majority and moved out of Milton’s lodgings,
Phillips graduated from pupil to collaborator with his uncle in
Interregnum pamphlet warfare. In 1652 Milton trusted the
21-year-old Phillips to respond to an attack on Pro Populo
Anglicano Defensio (1651). Expressing pride in being trusted
to defend his uncle and teacher from such a nonentity as the
anonymous author of the attack, Phillips loads Joannis
Philippi Angli Responsio Ad Apologiam Anonymi (1652) with
linguistic jokes and learned invective. Of course, Milton himself
would later use the same salty style in Pro Populo Anglicano
Defensio Secunda (1654). Because a “lowly” style fits the
decorum of pamphlet warfare—written in Latin so that only the
educated, who were presumably less subject to corruption, would get
the salacious jokes—Milton valued and found perfectly appropriate
his young nephew’s flair for wicked, even scurrilous satire
(Coiro...

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